Quantum Non-Linearity: The Epistemic Underwriter

Sunday, January 04, 2015

The Epistemic Underwriter

We depend on the cosmos being dependable, readable, rational, coherent, intelligible and above all having epistemic integrity.

Here's one of the latest comments I found on Jason Lisle's blog. (Research Update August 2014) It's significant because I probably have common ground with Lisle on this topic and would largely agree with him.

Stefan Frello says:

December 4, 2014 at 10:37 am

I should have been a little more precise. In order for a theory to be scientific, it should follow Occam’s razor. You should be able to make predictions from the theory, and it should be falsifiable (because it is convenient, If not for other reasons).

Dr. Lisle says:

December 31, 2014 at 10:20 am

The problem with this answer is that it disconnects science from reality. That is, your view of science is that it is a way of answering questions that is “convenient” but not necessarily true or having anything whatsoever to do with reality. In the Christian worldview, science is a tool we use to answer certain questions about the actual universe. And it works because God upholds the universe in a consistent way with patterns that we can discover with increasing probability (though not necessarily certainty) using our mind and senses that God designed. But on your worldview, there is no reason to think that the procedures of science, including Occam’s Razor, have anything whatsoever to do with reality. Thus, your worldview cannot justify science as a method of obtaining empirical knowledge. And that’s been my point all along. Only Christianity can do this.

What I would add to this is that we come to God in an a priori way: "In the beginning God the Father and therefore the universe will make (some) sense because his creation will be coherent and intelligible". However, this approach can't be offered as "a proof of God" as I have heard some Christians suggest; we can only start with the basic ideas of cosmic integrity and rationality sourced in a personal God and then exploit this concept, a priori, as the corner stone of our epistemology. That is, we can't infer God from an intelligible universe, but if we posit a God of integrity we can infer a comprehensible universe.**

If some atheists choose to exploit an epistemic that depends on an intelligible universe as a given "brute fact", then in spite of them not believing that the success of this epistemic is sourced in God, they too will reap the reward of noetic riches; although they won't be able to relate this success to any higher reason.... for them "it just is".

Good 'ole Jason Lisle - I agree with him for once! Where I would probably disagree with him is in a typically fundamentalist lack of generosity to atheists*: Atheists who trust the integrity and rationality of the universe as a given and consequently make scientific advances to the benefit of us all are doing God's work and are glorifying him. Moreover, when I look at the general state of the religious world I can hardly blame them for being atheists. Fundamentalists of all religious brands give me the creeps and constitute some of the best arguments for atheism. But the sad fact is, atheism sometimes finds itself teetering on the edge of the chasm into nihilism, the abyss where the chaos monster lurks.

Relevant Links:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/how-to-know-you-know-you-know-it.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/epistemic-notes.html

Footnotes:
* Fundamentalists also lack generosity to fellow believers who don't follow their views (if indeed they even think of them as fellow believers). See for example the link below where we catch Jason Lisle thrusting blasphemies and heresies into the mouths of fellow Christians.

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/once-again-false-dichotomy-zone-god-did.html
** But that said we have to acknowledge that often our world makes little moral sense - basically that's the problem of pain and evil.

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Sunday, January 04, 2015

The Epistemic Underwriter

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION